Round up is the monthly show on The Recruiting Future Podcast channel that highlights episodes you may have missed and gives you my take on some of the key learnings from the guests.
Episodes mentioned in this Round Up:
Ep 337 – Interview Intelligence
Ep 340: Changing Candidate Experience
Ep 341: Culture Fit Doesn’t Exist
Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:17]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to the March Roundup episode of the Recruiting Future podcast. If you’ve not listened to Roundup before, it’s a short review of the episodes that I’ve published in the last month to make sure you don’t miss out on the valuable insights that my guests are sharing. So, how was your march? It looks like we got a bit of a mixed picture globally in terms of lockdowns and third waves of the pandemic. Wherever you are in the world, I hope you’re keeping safe and well and seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Getting brighter every day.
In terms of the podcast and topics of discussion generally in the talent acquisition industry, everyone is certainly now looking to the future and I spoke to a really interesting selection of people across the seven interviews that I published published during the month of March. Back in 2019, I interviewed Theo Smith about neurodiversity at work. At the time, I didn’t have much of an understanding of neurodiversity and it was great to learn from Theo about the challenges neurodivergent people face at work, what employers can do to support them, and the enormous benefits this support will bring to everyone. Theo has since teamed up with Professor Amanda Kirby and they’re about to publish a book on neurodiversity at work in episode 335. I caught up with them to find out more about the book and what talent acquisition professionals can be doing to be more inclusive in recruiting and assessment. The future of jobs in an age of AI and automation has been a popular topic on the podcast. We’ve tended to talk in quite theoretical terms and never truly considered what practical solutions there might be to the inevitable job displacement. Millions of jobs have already been lost in the pandemic, and the World Economic Forum predicts that an additional 85 million jobs will be lost to automation by 2025. So what types of jobs will disappear and how do we upskill and transition the large proportion of the workforce who’ll be affected? In episode 336, I spoke to Madeleine Gabriel and Carlis Canders from NESTA, the UK’s innovation agency for social good. NESTA has just completed a significant piece of research called Mapping Career Causeways, which is intended to support job transitions and inform skills policy in a labour market that AI and automation will change forever. Interviews have always been the central tenet of the hiring process and the one area where it’s been most challenging to collect any kind of meaningful data. The mass move to video interviewing over the last 12 months has potentially changed everything. So what data can we now gather and how can it be analyzed to drive actionable improvement in the interview process? Siol Magos is co Founder and CEO of Metaview. Metaview is a technology startup that’s helping some very well known employers gather data and act on interview intelligence in new and innovative ways. I caught up with syel in episode 336 and we talked about using data to make sense of and improve interviewing at scale. It’s fair to say that trends in recruiting technology are moving very quickly. The events of the last 12 months have turbo boosted some areas of the market and radically disrupted others. So what’s changed, what’s accelerating and what does the future look like? Hung Li is editor of leading industry newsletter Recruiting Brain Food and a keen observer of recruiting technology. The last time I spoke to him on the podcast was in 2016, so it was brilliant to have him return to the show to share his considerable insights. In episode 338. Diversity, Equity and inclusion are critically important. However, despite much discussion and much debate, many employers are still failing to improve their hiring diversity. Those employers that are moving the needle are those that have actionable strategies and leadership accountability. In episode 339 I spoke to Rachel Hirsch who is a recruiter at Frame IO. Frame IO have a genuine focus on diversity, equity and inclusion and have tangible results to show for it. In our conversation, Rachel shared their strategy and identified the key elements that have driven their success, particularly when it comes to improving the gender balance in sales leadership. Candidate Experience has been a regular topic on this podcast. As long as this podcast has existed, people often get understandably frustrated that we keep having to talk about it as poor Candidate Experiences still persist. For many, however, improving the Candidate Experience isn’t a single time limited problem. It’s an ongoing process that evolves in line with expectations and technology. With that in mind, Talent acquisition teams must treat the Candidate Experience strategically as a science rather than as a one off project. Kevin Grossman is President of the Talent Board, the organizers of the Candidate Experience Awards. The Candidate Experience Awards have been running for 10 years now and Kevin has a massive amount of valuable data based insights to share on how the Candidate Experience Challenge has been evolving. We had a great chat in episode 340 about what’s going on right now in Candidate Experience and how the rise of automation technology is going to affect things in the future. Finally, one area that’s been of genuine interest to me recently has been company culture and how some of the core ways we used to think about it are being disrupted. Remote working has meant companies are having to think much harder about how they work, and showcasing their culture during the recruiting process has become a real challenge. Another significant area of debate has been the use of culture fit as an assessment criteria and whether culture fit even actually exists. In episode 341, I spoke to Brett Putter, CEO of Culture Gene and author of several books on company culture. Brett spends a significant amount of his time researching corporate cultures, with a strong recent focus on companies that were already working remotely before the pandemic. He had some very valuable knowledge to share on what company culture now means in our much disrupted times, and it was great to talk to him.
So onwards into April, and I’m genuinely excited about some of the amazing people I’ve got lined up to speak to. Not only that, I’m going to be running a live podcast event on 21st April in conjunction with the team at TA Tech. Watch out for more details on that soon. If you haven’t already. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show, including more details about the live event. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
